I'm new to the market and I'd love it if someone could provide me with some info on the typical accomplishments for folks who landed clinical R1 jobs last cycle. Also if this isn't your first year on the market have you been surprised by the people who got positions? I'm a bit terrified that I'm not prolific/sexy enough and I'd like to know where to set my expectations.

I was recently hired in Clinical. Rather than go into the gory details of my accomplishments I will just say that I spent 3 cycles on the market and noticed massive variability in the CVs of folks who landed jobs ahead of me in years 1-2. Some had endless PNAS/Nature papers while others had just one or two mid-tier articles and no outside funding. All things being equal, better CVs get hired over worse CVs. Pubs, grants, and to a lesser extent teaching all play a roll. However, and this is big, your CV is evaluated in a raging tempest of factors beyond your control.

What research area are they looking for? Do they already have a candidate in mind? Does a random committee member dislike your method of choice? Is big data/genetics/fMRI/etc hot this year? Does someone else have a big name PI making calls on their behalf?

Just fire off applications, sit back, and enjoy the ride. As an aside, if you are really curious just go to last years wiki, look at who was hiring, and go to their department sites. Or just look at a range of JF CVs in your area and check what they had the year they were hired.

I agree that there is a huge range in re to the number of publications/grants for folks who ultimately land a TT position at a R1. Ultimately, I think "fit" wins out, which may be hard for some of us (myself included) to accept because "fit" is hard to quantify (unlike grants and pubs), and leaves us (me) grappling with unknown ambiguity. So, in the spirit of DBT, let's be willing and not willful, and accept that this is the state of things :)

For what it's worth, my mentors said I would be competitive this go-around, and I'm applying to select R1 schools. I have 30ish pubs (25ish first author), 2 grants (1 active K).

—» I have 30ish pubs (25ish first author), 2 grants (1 active K).
This is what I mean by astronomically prolific.

At our university, we have a relatively well known R1 Clinical graduate program. The training of the program is heavily geared towards therapy but the group likes to think of themselves as research oriented. That said, I think a graduate student coming out of the program would average 0-2 peer-reviewed publications and maybe 1-2 chapters in an edited volume. Granted I have very little understanding of publication in the clinical world, but I suspect that in the history of the program there has never been someone with '30-ish' publications.

I'm in cog neuro and have sat on several S.C.s in the past few years. In general, our shortlists consisted of people with ~10 publications, 2+ years of postdoc experience and some sort of pre-doc or postdoc NRSA/NSF fellowship. Last year we did have someone apply who had ~30publications but they were 7 years post-Ph.D.

I have many friends in clinical on the market this year (I'm in cognitive) and it does seem like they all have a ton of pubs relative to those like me in cognitive and other friends of ours in social. In my admittedly tiny tiny sample of my friend group, the difference between cog/social and clinical seems to boil down to our clinical friends publishing several papers based on large datasets (like large-scale prevalence studies) their labs have access to. Alternatively, in cog and social it seems like studies are more usually lab-based and time intensive. Hence fewer pubs. This seems to happen a lot in developmental, too, where one longitudinal study can yield a ton of publications.

Really though, you can't control what other people are doing so just try and present your own work as best as possible and let the chips fall where they may. Given the vagaries of how SCs make decisions you'll just drive yourself crazy trying to figure out why a particular person got hired for a particular job.

This is amusing. As a clinical post-doc I often hear people saying that it's easier for social and cognitive folks to get out publications since they so often rely on studies that can quickly be administered to undergraduates rather than by recruiting clinical samples. One of the things I've heard from internship/post-doc faculty is that clinical students are having many more pubs than previously in part to be more competitive for internship spots that are increasingly difficult to get. So that may be playing into some of the sense that clinical students tend to be more and more research productive.

I've always had a skewed perspective of publishing in clinical. As a friend of mine put it about a clinical lab at our institution, "anyone who breathes the air in that lab gets authorship." I've noticed this with other clinical labs, too; for instance, first-semester first-year students getting put on papers that were nearly complete, but maybe they helped with some coding, or making figures, at the last minute. Things never worked that way in my lab. There were times when I joined ongoing projects, but this happened just three times, and I had to earn authorship by designing and running a study, doing analyses, reviewing literature, and/or doing substantial writing.

I'm of course not sure that all clinical labs work this way, but of those I am familiar with (about five), this is the way they operate. And that's fine, it's a different subfield with different expectations (maybe in part a reaction to internship and post-doc competitiveness?). But if I'm wrong about this I'm happy to be corrected.

That is lab specific and not restricted to clinical. Most clinical folks graduate with fewer pubs than cog/dev students. Most clinical faculty have far more pubs than the average clinical student. It's skewing your perception of reality.